What is a Good Dental Patient?
The best patient for a dental practice varies from one office to another. What is a great new patient client for one dental office may not be the best patient in another. For example, a pediatric dentist would not be interested in a person who needs a dental implant. Of course we are stating the obvious, but don’t lose us yet, because this is where putting the power of the internet to your advantage can really grow your practice if you effectively market your dental practice online.
How to Get the Patients you Want by Marketing Your Dental Practice Online
1. Website Design For Dentists
Website design and high quality dental content with lots of specific details about high-dollar procedures. But how will this help the dentist control what new patient calls and emails they get? If the dentist wants implant patients or Invisalign patients, they need to put more information about implants and Invisalign on their website. Websites connects to other things on the internet such as a Facebook page and a Google Business listing.
2. Social Media for Dental Practices
Facebook posts and information about implants and Invisalign can be placed on Facebook and Google Business. A Facebook post about replacing teeth with implants can reference back to the dentist’s website where people can learn more about replacing teeth. The general rule of thumb is if the dentist wants to get more implant patients they need more content and information about implants on their website. There also needs to be other information on the internet that refers people to the doctors site for information about implants. The references to the dentists website from other places online is called “offsite” or “offpage” SEO because it literally optimizes the site for a given thing (implants in this case) by letting search engines know that a website contains relevant information about a subject.
3. Google Business and Online Listings
Internet of Online Listings include Yelp, Yellowpages, Bing local and Google Business. Some “listings” are very basic and just list a name, address and phone number, while others include the ability to post information about a business, services and in some cases the ability to write articles and blog posts. Here is the dentist’s opportunity to talk about and reference those implants again. But back to “name, address and phone number” or NAP. It is very important to have your business name be consistent, for example one listing may list “Dr. Jones Dentist” while another may have “Larry Jones DDS”, etc. It is important for businesses with multiple phone numbers to have all listings use the same phone numbers. And address too all need to be listed the same way, not Suite 100 in one listing and #100 in another. Search engines counts how many different places the dentist is listed and figures if they are mentioned in a lot of places that they are important and they do implants. There are services that enable you to manage listings all in one place. Two such services include Brightlocal.com and Moz Local.
4. Google Business Listing
Google Business gets it’s own section because it is so important. Google Business is a combination of a business listing, social media and a content platform as well. It is also owned by Google, hence it’s importance to the same search engine. Google business has an area where you can put information about products, services, pictures and even blog posts. You can even put video. Google Business also has information about the dentist’s Youtube Channel and links to the practice website. Reputation management (more on all this later). Google has reviews from patients who have visited the dentists practice. Obviously you want to have great things said about your practice. You get it. It may be best to have a professional set up your Google Business because it is just that important.
5. Google Ads and Pay Per Click Advertising
PPC or pay per click advertising by Google Adwords and Bing Ads is the holy grail of online advertising. If you know what you are doing with PPC, you can get a lot of high quality dental patients and you can make a lot of money. I believe every effective advertising campaign for dentists includes a combination of Google paid ads and other online dental marketing. The benefit of paid advertising is it can be implimented quickly and the return on investment can be immediate. Run the ad today and work on the new dental patient tomorrow. The negative of paid advertising is that it is expensive and if the PPC company does not understand the patients you want to see as well as dental in general, you may waste a lot of money. For example you can pay for a lot of expensive ads and have your phone ringing with patients who want fillings and cleanings. But you want new implant patients. The ads are too expensive to run for patients who just want cleanings. You already have those.
6. Online Reviews and Reputation Management for Dentists
Google reviews, Yelp reviews, they are huge. You can get tons of new patients if your dental practice reviews are good. You can lose tons of new patients if you get a negative online reputation. You can never make everyone happy, but try to get at least 4-4.5 start reviews online. And try to get reviews every week or at least every month. More on this later.